Challenges and Choices

We all have many challenges in our lives but it is the choices we make when we are faced with these challenges that create our experiences. We are constantly making choices, and we can either make conscious choices or unconscious choices.

It is the beginning of a new year and a perfect time to start making conscious choices. You can choose now to be either a slave or a master. Many people live their whole lives as slaves to the demands of life, never even realizing that they could just as easily chose to be the master of their lives.

We could think of life as a school. The challenges of our lives are the lessons we need to learn for our growth and development. And the whole purpose of our being here is to learn or discover how to become masters of our lives. If we choose to become masters of our lives we have to take charge and realize that it is us that always make the choices that create our experiences. Many times we think we “have to” do certain things. We do not have to do anything. Whatever we do is always the result of a choice we make, either a conscious choice or an unconscious choice. Every choice has a consequence, but we weigh the probable consequence of our choices and go ahead and make them.

Before the New Year starts I suggest that we all start making some conscious choices about what we want to create in the coming year. To begin this process we need to take some time right now to think about our life. The first step in taking charge is to prioritize things in order of their importance to you. The first thing on my list is my health. If it isn’t first on your list you may need to rethink it. Your health has everything to do with your ability to help yourself and others, and your ability to enjoy life. If you do not take care of it first you become less and less capable of doing anything else.

Maybe next on your list could be family, relationships, work. It is important to get clear about what is most important to you rather than just reacting to whatever comes up. Reacting is slave behavior, never thinking or asking questions, just doing what is expected of you.

To become a master of life you must shift into a pro-active mode, where you know that you are in charge of your life and you are making your choices consciously. The next step is to determine how much time you will devote to each of the most important things on your list. For example, health, what will you do to keep yourself healthy and growing, and how much time will that take? We all have 24 hours a day, and if we are going to be in charge, we must create a structure to guide our behavior.

My choice, which is the most valuable thing I could do for my health, is to do the Unlimited Futures process twice a day. This will take 2 hours a day for most people. I like to spend an hour and a half for my morning routine. Whatever amount of time you want to take is then allotted to doing the process. Everything else falls into the remainder of the time. If you choose to do the process in 2 hours, you then have 22 hours left. The next choice is what else do you do for your health? We need 7 or 8 hours of sleep. I choose 8 for myself, but you chose and deduct that from your total, which leaves you with 16 hours for other things. Next, just to take care of your health, you still need to eat. Let’s allot 3 hours a day to eating, leaving you with 13 hours.

The next big chunk of time may be devoted to your work. Let’s say you choose to work 8 hours a day. This gives you 5 hours of flex time. There are things that are important to you to devote some of that time to. They must come first in prioritizing your actions and time. At any rate, you will still have some flex time, which is important to have some time that can be allotted to whatever is most important for you to do at the time.

By taking charge of your life, creating a structure, and making conscious choices, that do not change, are the basis for becoming a master of life. Being capable of doing this comes from learning some of the lessons that our challenges have taught us. If we do not learn the lessons we just keep getting the same challenges over and over until we do learn. This involves experiencing the consequences of choices that you make unconsciously, which are also a part of the learning process, but usually a very undesirable experience.

Once you start experiencing the results of working with this process, you will want to participate in our Personal Growth and Development Core Course, which we now have available on DVDs so you can experience the course in the comfort of your own home. We have a free introductory session of that course, so please download that before leaving the site.

In addition we also provide in-residence courses that you may attend to accelerate this natural evolutionary process.